Project Details
Projekt
A Critical Art History of International and World Expositions: Decentering Fashion and Modernities
Subject Area
Art History
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 493884840
The World’s Fairs of the 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to significant impulses for the histories of art and fashion. Both were fixed components of the national self-presentation at the world’s fairs from the very beginning. This research project will conduct a fundamental revision of art and fashion, for the first time in the context of the world’s fairs. The project thus meets three desiderata: First, it will make a significant contribution to a de-centering of art and fashion metropolises. Not only was the world brought together in miniature at the world expositions, but also objects and artifacts from very different areas of technology, handcrafts, the visual arts, and fashion were brought together in a holistic model. Such unifying ideas were reflected in the nineteenth-century concept of a “Gesamtkunstwerk.” World’s fairs created such centers of seeing and showing, and served, for example, to establish Paris as an art and fashion metropolis, distinguishing it from its ‘peripheries,’ such as Latin American representations and colonies, which in contrast were presented as traditional and ‘authentic.’ Second, a central concern of the project is to challenge the constructions of modernity associated with the fairs in the context of a “critical globalism.” Staging ‘modern’ art as related to the ‘national schools’ emerging at the same time was also a way of negotiating artistic metropolitanness and ‘periphery’ in the transnational framework of the world’s fairs. Thus, world’s fairs created a competition over modernity, where the western nations were conceived as industrially, artistically, and fashionably advanced. Latin America in particular, as not yet modern but no longer colonized, take on an ambivalent role in the context of the world’s fairs. Third, art history and fashion studies thus require a substantially new perspective by approaching the entanglements of the world’s fairs from positions of postcolonial and decolonial theory. Such a theoretical formation is particularly well suited for working out ambivalences, since it uses multiplied views to expand the binary constructions of center and periphery, modernity and tradition. The project intends to open up a new field in art history and Fashion Studies by approaching the “entangled histories” of the world’s fairs against the backdrop of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. On the basis of case studies in the two following two main areas, essential knowledge can be gained about how art and fashion are mutually connected in the multi-layered context of the world’s fair: 1. “Fashioning the World” (to be directed by A. Karentzos) will concentrate on the role of fashion and textiles in the globalized context of the artistic exchange at the world’s fairs; and 2. “De-/Colonial Modernities: Representing ‘Peripheries’ at World’s Fairs” (to be directed by M. Oesterreich) will focus on the ambivalent position of Latin America as ‘peripheral’ presentations.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
Cooperation Partner
Professor Dr. Thomas Kirchner
